Road Not Taken pre-PAX preview: All the difference-maker

Triple Town creator will publicly debut its new puzzle masterwork this weekend.

Oh, I'm just hanging out in Road Not Taken with a creepy ghost, an angry wolf, and a forlorn child. Sup witchu?

The latest iteration of PAX, formerly the Penny Arcade Expo, will take over the Boston Exhibition and Convention Center this weekend, and with it will come a smattering of public video game debuts. PAX has always been a play-first show, and fans will surely line up to get their hands on unreleased, triple-A games like Borderlands: The Pre-Sequeland The Evil Within.

Ahead of the hubbub, which Kyle Orland and Lee Hutchinson will sift through all weekend, I took the opportunity to play a smaller—but just as significant—game getting its public gameplay debut at PAX East. Pardon the cheeky line, but I literally chose the Road Not Taken.

The game comes courtesy of Spry Fox, a Seattle-area studio possibly best known for smartphone hit (and frequent cloning victim) Triple Town. Since that game’s launch, the company, founded by ex-Xbox staffers, has toyed with the so-called casual genre’s most exciting and experimental ideas, from the bullet-hell MMO Realm of the Mad God to the trippy, world-building puzzler Leap Day.

Those subsequent gems haven’t exploded the same way Triple Town did, but they do inform the genius of Road Not Taken, a puzzler that promises a new gameplay experience every session. That’s because it's quite possibly the first puzzle-platformer with truly randomized levels, along with a gameplay loop that keeps those random challenges interesting.

While the game takes its title from the oft-quoted Robert Frost poem of the same name, there’s no “two roads diverged” gimmick to be found. Players find themselves in a small forest town whose children have been lost in a blizzard. As the new wanderer, you must solve top-down, 2D puzzles to reunite the kids with their parents. On a basic level, the game resembles ‘80s games like Chip’s Challenge or Kwirk, as players must carry and throw a level’s elements to clear a path.

Road Not Taken puts a few twists on this setup, and they add up to sheer puzzle brilliance. The first is a simple one: whatever direction you start to carry an object, you must throw it that way. For example, if a child is on your left when you pick her up, you have to eventually toss her left-ward. The second twist is a health meter, which ticks downward whenever you walk while carrying an object. Thus, you have to plot your steps and tosses in advance.

Enlarge/ This introductory puzzle wants you to toss trees around until they sit right next to each other. Easy enough, but as the game progresses, you'll encounter more obstacles and more violent creatures. For example, bees! Danged bees.

Yes, you can die in this seemingly casual game. Every playthrough maxes out at 15 levels, each composed of five to eight screens of puzzles, and nearly all of those are procedurally generated. The game will randomly insert pre-made rooms into a level, but for the most part, no two rooms are alike.

That’s because Road Not Taken comes with a lot of creatures, objects, and barriers, which matches the likes of Binding of Isaac in that regard. However, in Triple Town fashion, when players manage to place three or more of these objects alongside each other, the objects do everything from unlock doors to transform into new creatures, and some even become helpful items.

For example, maybe you need to get through one room’s mass of brush, so you head to another room to create an ax, chop some wood, and create a brush-clearing campfire. Oh, but picking the fire up whittles your health down even more than other objects, and you have to step a few times to position a perfect throw… eesh!

Each randomly generated level weighs all of its items, barriers, unlock needs, and health-deteriorating issues to ensure that it’s solvable; they just get harder and harder as you approach the 15th level in a session. Should you die before getting through the complete winter, you’ll come back to life at the beginning with one or two of the perks that you’ve already unlocked.

Spry Fox hopes to have the final game out for Steam, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation Vita by “the end of summer,” which will give the team enough time to possibly add more casual options. As it stands, Road Not Taken is a tough, tough game, but its random levels and endless unlocks make it the most interesting puzzle concept I’ve seen in years. Even if this road turns out to be a toughie by launch, I look forward to walking it.